Our independent lab has been exploring turtle cognition from the behavioral side for 30 years. Giving the turtles behavioral enrichment, socialization, and as much power as practical results in their enthusiastic response to learning and surprising results. Photos, stories, updates on events and writing excerpts, including our book-in-progress, DIODE'S EXPERIMENT: A BOX TURTLE INVESTIGATES THE HUMAN WORLD.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

I’m
excited that Finishing Line Press has announced my forthcoming chapbook of
poems, all about turtles. There are multiple poetry books about (and “by”) dogs
and cats, but turtles? No; and so many people tell me about their turtle loves.
On the pages you’ll meet a sea turtle, box turtles, and pancake tortoises,
especially those at our Chelonian Connection lab.

My
page on the Press’s site, includes an endorsement by Ingrid Wendt, winner of
the Oregon Book Award, one of three endorsements that make me very grateful.

(The
publisher offers a discounted S&H rate during the prepublication window: until
June 17, 2016. Books are scheduled to ship on August 12.)

Readers
of this blog may know that I’m not only an animal behaviorist, herpetologist,
and naturalist who—with a bale of box turtles and pancake tortoises who are
both socialized family animals and colleagues in our

exploration—has been
exploring turtle cognition in our- independent lab since 1979. I’m also a
prize-winning poet and nonfiction writer. Of course I write turtle poems!

Here
are four sample snippets, followed by one of the back-cover blurbs, this one by Robert
Michael Pyle.

From
“Wafford’s Eyes.” ….Each shining bead
reflects a single star but hides / your mysteries behind their blackness. //
Tell me, tortoise the size of my hand, how can I read their secrets?

From
“Flick of an Eyebrow.”….What matters is...the surge of her
tortoise muscles a motor against my hand / that somehow lifts my feet to follow
her will, // and the moments a happy conjunction of words slides together amid
the wonder of near-infinite combination.

From
“Communication.” ….Diode, at my feet, attentive, / her head angled up toward
the birds / from brown, sun-dappled leaves, // hasn’t moved a muscle since we
settled here. / Now the birds are farther off, / and gusts of wind are shaking
the canopy. // Trees say to each other, Sway.
/ We sit still and listen.

"Rosemary
Lombard loves turtles so much so that she flies and waltzes them through the
air, helps their probing beaks reach the columbines they love, takes their
gestures and meaning down in penciled runes. These might not be the luckiest
turtles in the world, but close, and we are among the luckiest of readers to
get to wander with them the grasses of Kilimanjaro, the trillium woods of home,
beneath the Harvest Moon. In poems of great inventiveness, delicacy, and
precision, Ms. Lombard teaches us more about the lives, perceptions, and dreams
of turtles and tortoises than we might learn in a lifetime trying by ourselves,
as we “plod with (our) ground-bound feet on the earth.” Happily, she looks
right into their eyes that are “midnight skies of miniature worlds,” and brings
those secret worlds of turtles back to us in these magical poems."

—Robert
Michael Pyle, author of Evolution of the
Genus Iris and Chinook &
Chanterelle;Winner of the John
Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing

Illustrations. Cover image is a self-portrait by pancake tortoise Willow, who was using a mirror. See the post on art by the turtles. The turtles have demonstrated this ability in many venues: universities, art galleries, a cultural arts center, nature centers, and science museums.

About Me

Animal behaviorist/ herpetologist Rosemary Lombard has happily worn the titles university teacher, biomedical librarian, naturalist, and others, but her favorite title is turtle tutor. Her book-in-progress, currently called DIODE'S EXPERIMENT: A BOX TURTLE INVESTIGATES THE HUMAN WORLD, tells the story of her 30 years of exploring the surprising cognitive abilities of turtles. She lives with her 15 turtle collaborators at her independent behavioral lab in Hillsboro, Oregon. For more information, visit "Rosemary Lombard" on Facebook and, by request, receive the "CHELONIAN CONNECTION [E]-NEWSLETTER."
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SELECTED ONLINE
PUBLICATIONS
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"The Call of the Rails," BAY NATURE, http://baynature.org/articles/oct-dec-2002/ring-around-the-bay/the-call-of-the-rails.
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"Haunted Garden," BLUEPRINTREVIEW 27, http://www.blueprintreview.de/27haunted.htm
About the "Turtle Lady" by humorist Murr Brewster: http://murrbrewster.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-does-dime-go.html